It came a few weeks in, at bedtime, the question I had been dreading since Paulette’s phone call, and Ollie asked it the way children ask the hardest things, sideways and sudden, staring at the ceiling instead of at me.

“Did you stop loving us?” he said.

I was sitting on the floor by his bed.

The nightlight was on.

Josie was already asleep across the hall with her door propped open.

And I understood that everything depended on the next thing I said, that this was the center of it, the wound under all the other wounds, and that I could not lie to him and could not blame anyone and could not give a six-year-old the tangled adult truth of it either.

So I told him the cleanest true thing I had.